I know that when I read a good book, I experience internal clarification: my sense of uniqueness as a person grows lucid. The measured, precise voice that reaches me from the outside animates voices within me, some of which may have been mute until this other voice, or this particular book, came and woke them. And even if thousands of people are reading the very same book I am reading at the very same moment, each of us faces it alone. For each of us, the book is a completely different kind of litmus test.

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About Me

I have published four novels and two books about eighteenth-century British literature; my latest book is "Reading Style: A Life in Sentences." I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.